Free vs Paid Assessment Prep: What's Worth Paying For

Free assessment prep means practising with material you do not pay for: the official sample tests that publishers like SHL, Aon and Talogy put on their own websites, the free practice tests on preparation platforms, past papers, and free question banks. Paid assessment prep means buying access to a larger, structured question bank with timed mock tests, worked explanations, progress tracking and, increasingly, AI coaching. Both work. The honest answer to which one you need is that it depends on how much time you have, how many test types you face, and whether your problem is knowing what to do or being able to do it fast enough.

Free vs Paid: the Short Version

There is a lot of dishonest writing on this topic, most of it published by companies that sell prep, including, to be blunt, this one. So here is the position this article argues, up front: free resources are genuinely good at teaching you what a test looks like and roughly where you stand. They are structurally bad at three things: volume, feedback and norm-referenced scoring, because those things are expensive to produce and nobody gives them away indefinitely. Whether that gap is worth money depends entirely on your situation, and for a meaningful number of candidates it is not.

This is a comparison of categories, not of brands. We are not going to rank competitors, because we sell one of the products in the comparison and any ranking we produced would be worth exactly what you paid for it. What we can do honestly is describe what each category of resource can and cannot do, and let you decide.

What Free Assessment Practice Actually Gives You

More than most paid articles admit. Four categories of free material are genuinely useful, and you should exhaust all four before you spend anything.

1. 1Official publisher sample tests. SHL, Aon (cut-e), Talogy, Saville and most other major publishers put practice tests on their own sites, free, in their own interfaces. These are the closest thing to the real test that exists, because they are made by the people who make the real test. They are short (often a handful of items) but they show you the exact interface, the exact instructions and the exact clock. Nothing else replicates that.
2. 2Free practice tests on prep platforms. Including ours: our free-test landers give you a timed test in a realistic interface, at no cost and with no payment details. Their purpose is honest and obvious (they are a sample of a paid product) but a sample you can sit for free is still a real diagnostic.
3. 3Past papers and public-sector materials. Government, defence and civil-service recruiters in several countries publish specimen tests or detailed test descriptions. For those employers this is not just free practice, it is the authoritative source.
4. 4Free explanatory content. Guides, worked examples, formula sheets and decision rules, the kind of thing you are reading now. Knowing that 'the passage says some, the statement says all, therefore Cannot Say' is a rule you learn once, free, and it is worth several marks.

Where Free Practice Stops Working

Free material has four structural limits. They are not accidents of quality; they follow from the economics of giving something away.

• No norm-referenced scoring. Real tests report a percentile against a norm group (other graduates, other applicants for the same intake) not a raw percentage. A free test tells you that you got 14 out of 20. It cannot tell you whether 14 out of 20 is competitive, because it has no norm group to compare you to. This is the biggest single gap, and it is why candidates routinely walk into a real test with a badly calibrated sense of where they stand.
• No feedback loop. Most free tests mark you and stop. Knowing the answer was C is nearly worthless; knowing that you chose B because you read a percentage change as a percentage-point change is what changes your next answer. Explanations are the expensive part of any question bank, which is exactly why free versions rarely have them.
• Limited volume. Publisher samples run to a handful of items. You cannot build speed on a handful of items. Reasoning tests are won on pattern familiarity, and pattern familiarity is a function of question count. There is no shortcut around volume.
• No adaptive difficulty and no coverage of a full battery. Modern tests from several publishers adapt: get an item right and the next is harder. Free material almost never does. And free resources tend to be strongest for numerical reasoning and thinnest for everything else (situational judgement, inductive, mechanical, personality) which is a problem if your employer sends you a five-test battery.

What Paid Prep Actually Buys

Strip out the marketing and paid prep sells five things. Judge any paid product (ours included) on whether it actually delivers them.

1. 1Volume at the right difficulty. Enough questions that you never re-sit the same item, across every test type in your battery. This is the thing free material fundamentally cannot give you.
2. 2A feedback loop. Worked explanations on every item, not just an answer key, so that a wrong answer teaches you something. This is where an AI coach earns its keep: it can answer 'why is it Cannot Say and not True?' in the moment, which a static explanation sometimes cannot.
3. 3Norm-referenced or benchmarked scoring. Some sense of where your score sits relative to other candidates, so the number on the screen means something.
4. 4Timed, realistic mock tests. Full-length, correct duration, correct item count, correct interface pressure. Timing is trainable and it is the single most common reason competent candidates fail; you cannot train it on a five-item sample.
5. 5Structure. A plan, a progress record, and error tracking that tells you which of your four error types is actually costing you marks. Most candidates do not need more questions; they need to stop making the same mistake.

The Comparison Table

The table compares the categories of resource, not specific products. Read the last column as the honest verdict on what each category is genuinely for.

When Free Is Genuinely Enough

This section exists because it is true, not because it is good marketing. There are candidates who should not pay us, or anyone, and if you are one of them we would rather say so than take your money.

• You face one test type, not a battery. A single numerical test, four weeks out, is very manageable on free material plus discipline. It becomes a different problem when the invitation names four tests.
• Your baseline is already strong. If you sat a timed sample cold, finished inside the clock and got most of it right, your marginal gain from paid volume is small. Spend the money on something else.
• You have weeks of runway, not days. Time substitutes for money here. With six weeks you can hunt down free material across several sources, drill it and space it out. With five days you cannot, and the compression is exactly what you would be paying to solve.
• Your employer publishes specimen material. Several public-sector and defence recruiters do. Where an authoritative free specimen exists, it beats any commercial bank, including ours.
• The test is explicitly not preparable. Gamified trait assessments and neuroscience-based games measure natural response patterns. Being rested is worth more than any practice, free or paid.
• You are on a budget and the job is one of many applications. Prep is worth what the job is worth to you. For a speculative application, free plus a rested brain is a rational choice, and nobody should make you feel otherwise.

When Paying Is the Rational Choice

• You face a full battery. Four or five test types is a coverage problem, and free coverage is thin outside numerical and verbal. Assembling free material for situational judgement, inductive and mechanical reasoning takes longer than the practice itself.
• You have run out of fresh questions. The moment you start recognising items, your practice has stopped measuring reasoning and started measuring recall. That is the clearest signal that free volume has run out.
• Timing, not knowledge, is your failure mode. If you get items right untimed and wrong timed, you need full-length timed mocks at volume. There is no free substitute for that, and it is the most common reason strong candidates fail.
• You keep making the same mistake and cannot see it. A feedback loop (explanations, error categorisation, an AI coach that answers 'why?') is precisely what free material lacks.
• The stakes are concentrated. One assessment centre for the job you actually want, with a stage that gates everything after it. This is where the cost of prep is trivially small relative to what it is protecting, and it is also the case in which the honest advice is simply: buy the thing.

How to Get the Most Out of Free Resources

1. 1Identify the publisher first. Your invitation email normally names the platform, and the test URL usually gives it away when the email does not. Then go to that publisher's own site and sit their sample. Nothing else you do free is worth as much.
2. 2Sit one timed test cold, before any tips. Record the score, the seconds per item, and which of the four error types dominates: misread data, wrong method, calculation slip, or ran out of time.
3. 3Learn the rules once. The True/False/Cannot Say decision table, the percentage-change formula, the eight abstract pattern rules. These are free, finite and permanent.
4. 4Never re-sit a test you remember. Once you recognise the items you are measuring memory. Move to fresh material or accept that you have hit the free ceiling.
5. 5Track your errors in writing. One line per wrong item naming the real cause. This is free, it is what a paid platform does for you automatically, and about one candidate in twenty actually does it by hand.
6. 6Practise at your real clock, not slower. Untimed practice builds knowledge, not speed. Speed is the thing being tested.

• Start with the free landers: free numerical reasoning test, free verbal reasoning test and free situational judgement test.
• The rules worth learning once, free: our verbal reasoning guide and numerical reasoning guide.

Being Straight With You: MakingMoves.ai Is a Paid Product

You are reading a comparison of free and paid prep on the website of a company that sells paid prep. That is a conflict of interest and pretending otherwise would be worse than naming it. So here is precisely what we sell, what we give away, and what we do not claim.

• What is free, with no payment details: the free-test landers, and a free preview of 4 questions per test plus 5 AI coach messages. That is a genuine diagnostic, enough to see the interface, get a baseline and judge whether the explanations are any good.
• What is paid: the full bank of 113,000+ practice questions across 50+ test categories, full-length timed mock tests, worked explanations on every item, progress tracking, and unlimited AI coaching. Plans are GROW at EUR 19,95 per week, PRO at EUR 49,95 per month, and MAX at EUR 79,95 per month.
• What we do not claim: we do not have the real questions, we cannot promise a pass, and we cannot tell you an employer's cut score, because employers do not publish assessment pass marks, and the bar moves by role, intake and year. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something they do not have.
• What we would tell a friend: use the free tests first. If you finish comfortably inside the clock and score well, you may not need us. If you run out of time, or cannot explain your own mistakes, that is what the paid product is for. See pricing and decide with your eyes open.

A Sensible Sequence: Free First, Then Decide

1. 1Day 1: Diagnose, free. Sit the official publisher sample and one free timed test. Write down your score, your pace and your dominant error type.
2. 2Day 2: Learn the rules, free. Read the decision rules and formulas for your test types. Nothing here should cost money.
3. 3Day 3: Test the ceiling, free. Do every free question you can find for your test types. Note the moment you start recognising items. That is your free ceiling, and it usually arrives faster than people expect.
4. 4Day 4: Make the call. If you are hitting the clock comfortably and your errors are random rather than systematic, stop here and go and rest. If you are slow, or your errors repeat, buy volume and feedback, from whichever provider you judge best.
5. 5Days 5 onward: Volume and timing. Whatever you bought, use it the way it repays: full-length timed mocks, error review in writing, and a rule that you never re-sit a question you remember.
6. 6Final day: Rehearse, then stop. One full timed mock in the morning, then rest. Cramming the night before reliably lowers scores.

Frequently Asked Questions